TY - JOUR
AU - Ruebeck,Christopher
AU - Averett,Susan
AU - Bodenhorn,Howard
TI - Acting White or Acting Black: Mixed-Race Adolescents' Identity and Behavior
JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL - No. 13793
PY - 2008
Y2 - February 2008
DO - 10.3386/w13793
UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13793
L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13793.pdf
N1 - Author contact info:
Christopher Ruebeck
Simon Center
Department of Economics
Lafayette College
Easton, PA 18042
http://sites.lafayette.edu/ruebeckc/
E-Mail: ruebeckc@lafayette.edu
Susan Averett
Simon Center
Dept. of Economics
Lafayette College
Easton, PA 18042
E-Mail: AVERETTS@LAFAYETTE.EDU
Howard Bodenhorn
John E. Walker Department of Economics
College of Business and Behavioral Science
201-B Sirrine Hall
Clemson University
Clemson, SC 29634
Tel: 864/656-4335
E-Mail: bodenhorn@gmail.com
AB - Although rates of interracial marriage are on the rise, we still know relatively little about the experiences of mixed-race adolescents. In this paper, we examine the identity and behavior of mixed-race (black and white) youth. We find that mixed-race youth adopt both types of behaviors -- those that can be empirically characterized as "black" and those that can be characterized as "white". When we combine both types of behavior, average mixed-race behavior is a combination that is neither white nor black, and the variance in mixed-race behavior is generally greater than the variance in behavior of monoracial adolescents, especially as compared to the black racial group. Adolescence is the time during which there is most pressure to establish an identity, and our results indicate that mixed-race youth are finding their own distinct identities, not necessarily "joining" either monoracial group, but in another sense joining both of them.
ER -